The semiconductor integrated circuit industry has experienced rapid growth in the past several decades. Technological advances in semiconductor materials and design have produced increasingly smaller and more complex circuits. These material and design advances have been made possible as the technologies related to processing and manufacturing have also undergone technical advances. In the course of semiconductor evolution, the number of interconnected devices per unit of area has increased as the size of the smallest component that can be reliably created has decreased.
Many of the technological advances in semiconductors have occurred in the field of memory devices, especially non-volatile memory devices. A variety of structures and configurations have been developed to scale up a memory density in the non-volatile memory device. More particularly, a layer of discontinuous storage elements to store charge in a non-volatile memory device has been used to reach such a goal. However, size uniformity and distribution of such discontinuous storage elements may directly impact a memory device's characteristics such as for example, retention and threshold voltage. That is, an inconsistent size distribution of discontinuous storage elements in a memory device may disadvantageously affect performance of the memory device (e.g., a non-uniform threshold voltage distribution and degraded retention). Typically, a memory device that uses discontinuous storage elements to store a charge tends to have such an issue (i.e., inconsistent size distribution) and tends to be vulnerable to the inconsistent size distribution of the discontinuous storage elements. Thus, a memory device that uses a layer of discontinuous storage elements with more immunity to the inconsistent size distribution is needed.
The various features disclosed in the drawings briefly described above will become more apparent to one of skill in the art upon reading the detailed description below. Where features depicted in the various figures are common between two or more figures, the same identifying numerals have been used for clarity of description.